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Wednesday, May 28, 2014

Can Science Disprove the Soul

In “Can a Machine have a Soul?” Bill
Lauritzen claims to have disproved the soul.[1]
He’s considering the issue of weather or not transferring human consciousness
into a machine would give the machine a soul? His solution is to disprove that
humans have souls then there’s no soul to worry about. In my view the soul is a
symbol and it’s the spirit that lives on after death. So there’s no question of
proving or disproving the soul since there is no question or proving or
disproving symbols. For the sake of this issue I’ll use his terminology. He
assumes the soul is the thing that lives. After all, he would make the same
argument against the spirit. That argument is made by the bogus method of
merely assume what he thinks human ancestors must have thought about after life
and what they based it on. Basing it on something we know is false such as an
literalized analogy between smoke is the afterlife of fire, and breath
sustaining life, being like smoke, therefore like the smoke form the flame
breath must live on as soul. That’s his conjecture. Of course he assume this is
the only reason to think there might be a soul and thus he’s swept it out of
the way with modern doubt! That really is his only answer. Rather he asserts
that it was the attempt to explain oxygen. He’s using as breath in that sense.
It’s really breath that he means.[2]

To
reinforce it all he goes through a mock play where two cavemen has things out
and this is supposed to be actual proof. It’s nothing more than detailed
speculation. His little play is nothing more than taking us through the steps
on might go through to arrive at the conclusion of after life after having
witnessed death: He sees the blood, he reasons from past experience, that when
people lose a lot of this stuff they stop living. He sees the blood evaporate.
He understands that it’s going from a liquid to gaseous state (would he
understand that)? So he puts it all together and reasons. Of course it’s really
a modern person “reasoning” his way to answers he already knows. Is that proof
that this actually what happened? No it’s totally theoretical.He even shows a series of pictures of a goat
dying and rotting away to reinforce how one might come to the conclusion that
there is some mysterious thing in the air that makes us life (like he would
really know evaporation pus gas in the air).[3]
“So early humans thought there were ghosts and spirits living in the air. They
didn’t want a ghost angry with them, so they would kill and burn animals, so
they would kill and burn animals, even humans in some cases, in other word they
would make a sacrifice, to feed these ghosts and spirits. Sacrafice as
the root word sacer, meaning sacred.”[4] I
don’t think I’ve heard of sacrifice being a meal for ghosts. That’s a
conjecture and perhaps not a good one. It really is a minor point.

Then
he goes on a long triad about how science discovered oxygen to show that
science is so much better than religious thinking. Of course since he made the
whole thing up and its’ conjecture and he’s stepping over a bunch of steps that
took thousands of years it’s a rather meaningless point. Of course he totally
ignores the fact that modern science was created by Christians and one of the
chief discoverers of oxygen was Robert Boyle who was a devout Christian and who
did science as form of Christian apologetics. I say one because the actual
discover was a complex process involving several people. Joseph Priestly was
anther of those and he actually discovered it but Boyle paved the way.[5]
Both men were Christians. [6]. [7]
It’s absurd to compare primitive thinking to modern and try to pass that off as
proof that science is better than religion. We have modern thinkers who are
both scientific and religious, and modern science owes a great debt to
religious thinkers such as Newton
and Boyle, and even Priestly. In fact part of his rendition of the discovery of
oxygen includes a lot about Robert Boyle, he never does actually indicate that
was a Christian, so it appears as a rebuke to religious thinking.

He
then takes a long detour though a discussion of thing that really could be just
left out of the issue. These are matters of brain size vs the kind of diet we
have its suitability for hunter gatherer society. It really has nothing to with
the issues. He discusses alchemy and how the understanding of blood evaporation
and smoke might contribute to correlations between the basic elements and
alchemical knowledge. It’s not relevant but I surmise that he includes it to
indicate how wonderfully predictive his theories are. He can predict the nature
of alchemy with it, of course we already know how it turns out so it’s not as
though he’s predicting the unknown. Realizing he has strayed from the topic he
springs back to summarize the issue on the soul:

Getting back to the original question: can a machine
have a soul? Of course, there may be some mysterious energy we know nothing
about. However, if we apply Occam’s razor, I think we can see that we have a
simple theory that covers all the facts: the “soul” and “spirit” are convenient
terms invented by early humans who knew nothing about atomic theory. The “soul”
and spirit probably do not exist except perhaps in this ordinary sense, “a
person’s moral or emotional nature or sense of identity.”[8]

The reference to atomic theory
pertains to the reality about atoms and molecules and a modern understanding of
what happens with evaporation. He says we have a simple theory that covers the
facts. The problem here is he doesn’t know the facts. He has not given us any
facts. He has literally just concocted a speculative idea with no empirical
proof to back it up. He’s merely assuming correlations are cause and that he’s
exhausted the facts merely because he’s brought out a few facts that back his
view. Since he doesn’t value religion he doesn’t even try to understand what really
went into understanding the soul or the spirit. He offers just enough facts to
explain it away and then claims he has the facts. Moreover, notice that he puts
his theory in terms of probability, and not in terms empirical proof. It can’t
be a real disproof if it’s just a probability. There are other aspects of the
spirit that he had failed to come to terms with. Basically, he has made the
assumption that all knowledge is scientific so therefore the soul was invented
to explain scientific questions, the physical workings of the world. It’s more
likely the soul was a means of explaining religious and spiritual truth not
physical truth. We don’t’ know what al that entails.

It’s
probably related to the need to explain mystical experience, or the
sense of the
numinous. It’s bound to be related to spiritual needs, that would relate
to the
special sense that engenders concept such the Holy. First of all we know
that those aspects of the sacred that issue forth in mystical
experience, the sense of the numinous, are used to with complex
psychological issues.

Atheists
and skeptics reduce everything they critique and then lose the phenomena in the
reduction. Thus, they only see the explanatory
aspects of ancient religion and never try to think beyond the simple assumption
that people were doing this to explain things. This is the “Og no like noise in
sky” Idea. Stupid primitive people without science try to explain simple things
they don’t understand so they make up religion. That is all the skeptic can
see. But those who are aware of the mystical consciousness can see more. I am
sure the skeptics will argue that they are reading it in. All I can do is to
assert that if the reader will read Maslow and if the reader is aware of
Maslow’s acuity as a scholar, one will place a great deal of confidence in the
notion that Maslow was discovering and not reading in. Maslow interpreted everyday psychology
as laced with the trace of the supernatural, because for him “supernatural”
just meant a deeper level of consciousness about ordinary things. His
views of human psychology were laced with Jungian notions of archetypes. He
equated the archetypes with “supernatural.” In speaking of the relationship
between men and women and their relation to the psychological archetypes, he
finds that the same symbols are always used for the same meanings. This comes
out in psychological studies across the board. He marks archetypical thinking,
as B and D. B analysis has to do with the higher, ideal, abstract, D has to do
with the earthy human aspects of our existence; the practical the earthy. These
are roughly equivalent to St. Augustine’s
terms: height and depth. An example of what he’s talking about is the
male tendency to seek two of womanhood, the goddess and the witch (or well
itwhat rhymes with “witch”). Maslow says
that psychology tells us that we need a bit of both. A woman put on a pedestal
and seen only as a goddess is unapproachable and cannot be pleased. A woman
seen only as the ‘other’ can’t be respected and won’t make a good partner. Of
course this goes vice versa for the way women view men: the “good guy” vs.
“the outlaw,” the rebel, the “bad boy.” Materialists are going to find that
this point is trivial and just a part of daily living, and that’s the point.
The reason ancients have a tendency to sacralize these kinds of ordinary
relationships is because they sense a connection between them and the
transcendent. That is the sense of the numinous. The same symbols turn
up again and again, according to Malow, in all kinds of psychological study.
Psychologically there is a link between the use of certain symbols in mythology
and religion, and the transcendent.

He makes this connection himself.Iin
speaking of the dichotomy of most religious life between the “mystical” or
‘inner.’ ‘Personal’ to the organizational (he doesn’t use the phrase but the
“doctrinal”) “The profoundly and authentically religious person integrates
these trends easily and automatically. The forms, rituals, ceremonials, and
verbal formulae in which he was reared remain for him experientially rooted,
symbolically meaningful, archetypal, unitive.”[9]
He is revealing a link between the rituals of the primitives, mythology, and
religious experience (especially “peak experience” or Mystical consciousness).
That link is in the archetypes, the psychological symbols that ground us in a
sense of what life is about and give us a connection with these concepts of
height and depth, or the ideal and practical. In appendixI.
“An example of B analysis,” He states:

This can also be seen operationally in terms of
the Jungian archetypes which can be recovered in several ways. I have managed
to get it in good introspectors simply by asking them directly to free
associate to a particular symbol. The psychoanalytic literature, of course, has
many such reports. Practically every deep case history will report such
symbolic, archaic ways of viewing the woman, both in her good aspects and her
bad aspects. (Both the Jungians and the Kleinians recognize the great and good
mother and the witch mother as basic archetypes.) Another way of getting at
this is in terms ofthrough
the artificial dream that is suggested under hypnosis. It can also probably be
investigated by spontaneous drawings, as the art therapists have pointed out.
Still another possibility is the George Klein technique of two cards very
rapidly succeeding each other so that symbolism can be studied. Any person who
has been psychoanalyzed can fairly easily fall into such symbolic or
metaphorical thinking in his dreams or free associations or fantasies or
reveries.[10]

He
is relating this to the mythological symbols of the grate mother, the goddess,
the witch, the demon, and one might also think of Lilith or for men the Shy
Father, vs. the
demon the trickster. The link between mythological symbols and mystical
consciousness is further born out by another psychologist, David Lukoff who
made the link between the high incidence rate in the general population found
by the Greely study and the use of archetypes. Lukoff framed schizophrenic
delusions as private mythology.

“This method derives from the
discipline of comparative mythology but goes beyond to decipher the
psychological truths embodied in the symbol-laden stories. Campbell’s (1949) study The Hero
With a Thousand Faces is the premier example of this method. Lukoff (1985)
treated the account of a psychotic episode as a symbol-laden personal myth and
attempted to uncover themes that parallel the structure and content of classic
mystical experiences.”[11]

Other
studies, such as Buckley and Galanter (1979) have observed individuals in the
midst of mystical experience when exposed to religious ceremonies.[12]
Some might see this as undermining my own argument because skeptics do argue
that religious experience is a form of mental illness. But there is a distinction
between some mentally ill people having religious experiences and saying that
mystical experience is mental illness. Many studies disprove this assertion
(see chapter on “studies”). But as Lukoff shows, this
does not mean that some mentally people can’t have mystical experiences.

Maslow talks about the
psychological necessity of being able to maintain a transformative
symbology. He is not merely saying that we should do this, but that this is
what we do; it is universal and through many different techniques and
psychological schools of thought he shows that this has been gleaned over and
over again. What Jung called the Archetypes are universal symbols of
transformation, which we understand in the unconscious[13], and we must be able to hold them in proper relation to the mundane
(the Sacred and the Profane) in order to enjoy healthy growth, or we stagnate
and become pathological. It is crucial to human psychology to maintain this
balance. Far from merely being stupid and not understanding science, striving
to explain a pre-Newtonian world, the primitives understood this balance and
held it better than we do. Religious belief is crucial to our psychological
well being, and this fact, far more than the need for social
order or the need for to explain thunder, explains the origins of religion.

As Maslow says:

“For
practically all primitives, these matters that I have spoken about are seen in
a more pious, sacred way, as Eliade has stressed, i.e., as rituals, ceremonies,
and mysteries. The ceremony of puberty, which we make nothing of, is extremely
important for most primitive cultures. When the girl menstruates for the first
time and becomes a woman, it is truly a great event and a great ceremony; and
it is truly, in the profound and naturalistic and human sense, a great
religious moment in the life not only of the girl herself but also of the whole
tribe. She steps into the realm of those who can carry on life and those who
can produce life; so also for the boy’s puberty; so also for the ceremonies of
death, of old age, of marriage, of the mysteries of women, the mysteries of
men. I think that an examination of primitive or preliterate cultures would
show that they often manage the unitive life better than we do, at least as far
as relations between the sexes are concerned and also as between adults and
children. They combine better than we do the B and the D, as Eliade has pointed
out. He defined primitive cultures as different from industrial cultures
because they have kept their sense of the sacred about the basic biological
things of life.

“We must remember, after all, that all these happenings are, in
truth, mysteries. Even though they happen a
million times, they are still mysteries. If we lose our sense of the
mysterious, or the numinous, if we lose our sense of awe, of humility, of being
struck dumb, if we lose our sense of good fortune, then we have lost a very
real and basic human capacity and are diminished thereby.”

“Now that may be taken as a frank admission of a naturalistic psychological
origin, except that it involves a universal symbology, which is not explicable
through merely naturalistic means. How is it that all humans come to hold these
same archetypical symbols? The “primitives” viewed and understood a sense of
transformation, which gave them integration into the universe. This is crucial
for human development. They sensed a power in the numinous, that is the origin
of religion.”[14]

Ceremonies and rituals
about ordinary things such as puberty, sex, marriage, birth, death, these are
attempts at mediating the Ultimate transforromative
experiences that all religions take to the resolution of what they identify as
the human problematic. Pre historic man says “I see a connection between
my place in the universe, and this sense that I get when I reflect upon nature
as a whole. I sense that I am one small part in a great unity, and I sense this
in everything in life, falling in love,
having children, death., I have
a place in the universe in relation to whatever that is I sense beyond the
stars…” The skeptic reduces this to “Og like girls, but girls make Og nervous.”
So he makes rituals about sex and relationships to ward off the evil spirits
that make him nervous. But it’s clear, while pre-historic man probably wasn’t
an existentialist and perhaps wasn’t that sophisticated about it all, he did
sense a connection between life and the numinous. Of course this doesn’t mean
that the primitive humans had any special insight into relationships that we
need to follow. This
is strong evidence that people have always had a sense of the numinous as far
back as we know. This is an indication of some form of this sense because it
clearly shows a connection between ordinary aspects of life and the
transcendent. It also means that the typical skeptical explanation for the
origin of religion is just losing the phenomena, taking out the real
indications of a form of consciousness and reducing what they find to nothing
more than a simplistic explanation for things.

While it is true that these experiences and their psycho-social uses
have probably evolved over time, it is equally true that they were
probably being put to the same uses all along because we can see the
relationships between religious symbols, spiritual concepts, and
psycho-social aspects. It makes more sense to think they were used in
that way all along. the cocnept of the soul is just some simple idea of
saying "what keeps me living?O it's some ghost in the machine" but
rather why do I feel this strange sense of importance of life and the
world when I stare at the stars all night? Then to explain mystical
experience they come up with the realization that consciousness probably
transcends the material world. From that it's easy to think it lives on
after life. Then if the associate it with the wind in the trees and
blood and breath and life, that's scientifically mistaken but it's not
completely off track. It does at least link the feelings of mystical
experience with the reality and meaning of the world and the after life.

Mystical experience is at the base of religion itself. "Mysticism is a
manifestation of something which is at the root of all religions."[15]

David Steindl-Rast,

The question we need to tackle is this: How does one get from
mystic experience to an established religion? My one-word answer
is: inevitably. What makes the process inevitable is that we do with
our mystical experience what we do with every experience, that is,
we try to understand it; we opt for or against it; we express our
feelings with regard to it. Do this with your mystical experience
and you have all the makings of a religion. This can be shown.

Moment by moment, as we experience this and that, our intellect
keeps step; it interprets what we perceive. This is especially true
when we have one of those deeply meaningful moments: our
intellect swoops down upon that mystical experience and starts
interpreting it. Religious doctrine begins at this point. There is no
religion in the world that doesn't have its doctrine. And there is no
religious doctrine that could not ultimately be traced back to its
roots in mystical experience – that is, if one had time and patience
enough, for those roots can be mighty long and entangled. Even if
you said, "My private religion has no doctrine for I know that my
deepest religious awareness cannot be put into words," that would
be exactly what we are talking about: an intellectual interpretation
of your experience. Your "doctrine" would be a piece of so-called
negative (apophatic) theology, found in most religions.[16]

It makes sense that if every doctrine
has it's roots in mystical experience that the doctrine of the soul does
as well. Now it could easily be that the basic idea was invented by
observing breath i the body and wind in the trees then backed up by
these emotional experiences. That's ok it means there is no Casper the
friendly Ghost-like entity in us waiting to get out. We do not need to
hold to that view of the soul or the spirit. Spirit is mind, the word in
Greek means mind, it's perfectly logical to understand consciousness as
the aspect that lives on. A connection through mystical experience
would be quite logical for the spirit. So the reality of consciousness
as enduring connection with God and the infinite got mixed up with hoaky
notions about wind in trees and evaporation and produced this idea of
the ghost. That doesn't mean there is conscoiusness that survives death
and unites us with God or not spirit that is reinvigorated when we give
our lives to Christ. This tendency to want to destroy ideas of religion through scinece is nothing more than the illusion of technique. This notion harkens back to a book form the 70's by William Barrett.[17]Perhaps because science is
misunderstood by many as thriving upon proof, and it is seen as the umpire of
reality because its ability to prove empirically, (apologies to Karl Popper) the
illusion of technique is created in the minds of those who misunderstand
science in this way. I will say more about this in the next chapter. It is not
the scientists who create the illusion but the needs of science groupies who
expect it to ground their metaphysical needs that create the illusion. The
tendency to reduce all knowledge to one thing enables the illusion to work. The
illusion works in the way that reductionism works. If some aspect of reality
can’t be gotten at by our methods then we assume it doesn’t exist, because that
means it’s not something we can control.

…"The illusion of
technique," the modern dream of a single method that would apply in all
areas of human concern. Such hegemony encourages thinking in terms of a
"will to power," seeing things as 'manipulanda', that which awaits
reshaping by humans. Barrett contrasts this with the "will to
prayer," an attitude which, inspired by Platonic 'eros', seeks, not
control, but active engagement leading to personal transformation.[i]

Thus the only knowledge there is,
is in our control. In other words, the facts always support our view. So
naturally our manipulation of the world is absolute and produces all the
knowledge there is. If there seems to be anything beyond that we can reduce it
and lose the phenomena and we explain it away. Religious experience is reduced
to brain function, brain function is reduced to chemistry, chemistry has no
room in it for transcendent sprits and thus they don’t’ exist. The illusion is
backed by the fact that we can always manipulate more and more stuff and thus
demonstrate our view of the world works.

[15] Frank Crossfiled Haphold, Mysticism: A Study and Anthology. New York:Penguin Books, 1979, 16[16.]David Steindl-Rast. "The Mystical Core of Organized Religion," ReVision, Summer 1989 12(1):11-14.
Used by the Council on Spiritual Practices with permission.1989

on line: http://csp.org/experience/docs/steindl-mystical.html
accessed 4/8/14.Brother
David Steindl-Rast, O.S.B., is a monk of Mount Savior Monastery in the
Finger Lake Region of New York State and a member of the board of the
Council on Spiritual Practices. He holds a Ph.D. from the Psychological
Institute at the University of Vienna and has practiced Zen with
Buddhist masters. He is author of Gratefulness, The Heart of Prayer and Music of Silence: A Sacred Journey Through the Hours of the Day. [17] William Barrett, The Illusion of Technique: a Search for Meaning in A Technological Civilization.New York:Anchor books, 1979.

[18] Raymond D. Boisvert, “The
Will to Power and the Will To Prayer: William Barrett’s The Illusion of
Technique 30 years Latter.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy: A
Quarterly Journal of History, Criticism, and Imagination.” 22, (1), 24-32.

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